Souvenir

Souvenir is a short narrative adventure game about napping in chairs, shopping for coffee and running away from your mortality.

Souvenir was made over the course of one month for the Big Awful Jam 2016, where it proceeded to win the “Best 3D art” category, and can be played for free over at Itch.io.

Souvenir is a game in the genre of the so-called “walking simulators”, games that focus primarily on environmental exploration and experiencing the narrative. In Souvenir the player follows an old man on out shopping for coffee, only to end up in a rather unlikely and very literal trip down memory lane.

Only having a month to go from concept to finished game meant trying to keep the scope as limited as possible right from the start. Even though I was already aiming at a compact experience I still ended up having to cut some planned content, preferring to deliver a shorter, but as polished as possible experience given the available time. This turned out well enough, resulting in a short but quirky game that received attention from several indie-game focused blogs and a numberofyoutubers.

The sound design of the game was handled by Will Bowerman, who not only helped to bring the game alive through music and sound, but also proved to be a great sounding board while nailing down the theme and general concept of the game.